South Africa Faces a Daunting Task, but Angola’s Got Nothing To Do With It

The Angolan national flag and a flag depicting the image of José Eduardo dos Santos, the president of Angola, at the finals of the 2010 Africa Cup of Nations in Luanda, Angola, January 31, 2010. Egypt defeated Ghana in the final, 1-0. Photograph by Austin Merrill.

It’s been six weeks since I returned from Angola, where I kicked off Fair Play at the 2010 Africa Cup of Nations. Since my arrival back in New York I’ve been struck by how many people, during conversations about Angola, have asked skeptically if I thought South Africa would be ready in time for this summer’s World Cup. It’s as if people think that somehow a cloud of confusion will rise up from the chaos of Luanda, the Angolan capital, and float south over the whole of Angola and Namibia and Botswana, finally coming to a rest with a wheeze in South Africa, where it will poison the locals and the tournament organizers and convince everyone that up is down and down is suddenly up.Perhaps I shouldn’t be too quick to criticize. People base their skepticism on what they’ve read, after all, and American coverage of Africa trends heavily toward the horrible. And, predictably, there’s been no shortage of media speculation that South Africa is not up to the task of hosting the planet’s most-watched sports event. (Also, to be fair, there are legitimate concerns over fan safety. When I was in Johannesburg on my way to Angola my driver told me about a client of his who was mugged by a group of men last June after a soccer game in the heart of downtown. Johannesburg remains one of the most crime-troubled cities in the world.)

Still, it’s absurd to be concerned about how things will go in South Africa based on how the Africa Cup of Nations went in Angola. South Africa has enough to worry about (and to be proud of) without being burdened by the dysfunction of a place whose capital is fifteen hundred miles away from Johannesburg.

For many, 2010 is supposed to be the Year of Africa—a year that will feature, for a change, an abundance of positive attention paid to the continent.

Unfortunately, Angola did little to help that cause. What lessons can be learned?

The deadly attack on the team from Togo by separatist rebels in Cabinda got the Cup of Nations off to a terrible start. The tournament struggled, from there, to find its footing. There was some good soccer to watch, and the deserving team was crowned champion (Egypt, for the seventh time), but the attack cast a pall over the games—sadness over the deaths of members of the Togo delegation (three were killed, seven injured), disappointment that Angola had lost an opportunity to shake its war-torn reputation, and anger over the Confederation of African Football’s decision to ban Togo from the next two Cup of Nations tournaments for withdrawing from the competition after the attack.

Add to that the many difficulties that went along with getting around in Angola, and it’s easy to question why the country was allowed to host the tournament in the first place.

Liberated from its 27-year civil war, which ended in 2002, Angola spent a reported $600 million on four new stadiums for the tournament. A promotional TV spot showcasing the stadiums was broadcast on a near-constant loop while I was there—“Angola has arrived!” it bragged. I couldn’t help but wonder what most Angolans thought when they saw it.

For some, Angola has, in fact, arrived. You don’t have your capital declared the most expensive city in the world unless someone is interested in spending money there. Most of the lucky ones are connected to the oil industry in some way. Angola now stands nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with Nigeria as co-leaders of sub Saharan Africa’s oil production. But Angola’s oil reserves, estimated at 13 billion barrels, won’t support the country forever. “We’ve advised the government over and over to diversify,” one Western diplomat told me. “But they don’t listen.”

It’s hard to see any evidence that the oil industry is supporting anyone in the country beyond the super-rich. Luanda is a nightmare of endless slums and foul open sewers. The traffic is mind-bogglingly bad—a construction worker told me it once took him seven hours to go three miles. Perhaps that’s not surprising in a city designed to support 500,000 people, but which today is home to between four and nine million.

I was told that there are some lovely parts of Luanda. The closest I came to seeing evidence of that was my two-night stay at the end of my visit at an overpriced hotel that could have been plucked from any modern city in the world. None of the $400 a night I spent there did a stitch of good for the vast majority of the people living in the city. Most Luandans are forced to get by on less than two dollars a day, and Angola ranks near the bottom of most indices measuring longevity and quality of life. Even for those benefitting from the presence of Westerners—like my translator, Sebastiao, and my driver, Victor—resentment burns just beneath the surface.

“The foreigners have taken our city from us,” Sebastiao said to me glumly one day as we sat in lockjaw traffic. Even though there are a few more well-paying jobs today than there used to be, most Luandans, he said, “hate that the wealthy from the rest of the world have come in and forced their way of life upon us.”

Indeed, the affluent foreign population has essentially remade Luanda in its own image, building sleek new high rises and spacious gated subdivisions beyond the city’s southern border. The renovated international airport is a welcome change, but the terminal for domestic flights remains decrepit and awash in corruption. When I went there to buy a ticket to Benguela, Angola’s second largest city, a fight broke out between airport officials and parking lot scammers over whom should be paid a “finder’s fee” for bringing me in as a client.

The roadways, meanwhile, are a thicket of confusion. Victor, who is in his 60s and has lived in Luanda his whole life, got lost dozens of times while driving me to appointments in the city. On my last day he couldn’t find the airport. It’s not entirely his fault—a poorly executed re-routing of traffic to accommodate the influx of Westerners had gone without any thought given, apparently, to signage. And it is impossible to make a left turn. In order to go left, you must first turn right, head in that direction for some stretch of road—a few meters or a few kilometers, depending on the location of the road from which you came—and then make a U-turn, pointing you, at last, in the direction you’d originally wanted to go.

I didn’t understand this upon my arrival in the city. As a result, I was repeatedly disoriented, tricked into thinking that I was the butt of some cruel and elaborate urban-planning joke. It seemed the only logical explanation. Perhaps current efforts to rebuild roads and infrastructure will eventually make for a more livable city, but for now Luanda seems destined to become the next Lagos.

In the end I met some wonderful people and enjoyed some exciting soccer in Angola, but unfortunately it’s all the confused aggravation, the maddening red tape, and the long hours of my life lost in traffic that will stick with me most. After traveling and working across much of West Africa over the last 15 years, I was eager to see a new part of the continent. But I came away from Angola heartened only by the coastal town of Benguela—where I spent three days and watched the Egypt-Algeria semifinal—which shows promise as a future tourist destination for beach-goers. I suspect, though, that the reality of having to go through Luanda to get there may keep everyone away.

The next Cup of Nations is scheduled for 2012 and will be co-hosted by Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. Don’t be surprised if organizational problems arise once again. Libreville, Gabon’s capital, is nearly as expensive as Luanda, and Equatorial Guinea, like Angola, has struggled with what to do with its own substantial oil wealth. These countries are far from ideal hosts for such a large event, but what’s the alternative? The tournament can’t be held every two years only in relatively squared-away places like Ghana and Egypt. Perhaps the Confederation of African Football will finally agree to move the Cup of Nations from January to June, appeasing the European clubs that have to go without some of their top players mid-season every time the Cup of Nations rolls around. Maybe then FIFA and UEFA will be inclined to lend more of their support to the tournament. The possibility of televising the event internationally—and raising some much-needed money—is far more feasible in the summer as well.

There’s no way to guarantee, of course, that South Africa won’t have some stumbling blocks of its own this June and July. The country’s soaring crime statistics, battles with corruption, high HIV/AIDS infection rates, and ongoing racial tensions are potential trouble spots that could make for a volatile mix. And as was shown by the death of the luger Nodar Kumaritashvili at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in February, no country can weatherproof itself against tragedy.

But most indications are that South Africa has thus far managed to fend off the simmering threats to its goal of throwing the best tournament (and month-long party) the World Cup has ever seen. And with fewer than 90 days to go until the first game, the rumors that FIFA was looking to move the tournament to an emergency backup location (Germany, the 2006 host?) have ended. Over the last several weeks FIFA president Sepp Blatter has become increasingly vocal in his support of South Africa, particularly in the wake of the criticisms and concerns that came out of the Cup of Nations.

I wasn’t alone in feeling that Angola was unreasonably underprepared for the Cup of Nations. My flight home from Luanda was full of other journalists who were not shy about expressing their frustrations over their dealings with officials, transportation, and bureaucracy in Angola.

“Can we breathe easy now?” I asked a photographer friend of mine as we settled into our seats and waited for the plane to take us to Johannesburg, the first stop on my way back to New York.

“Not until we are out of Angolan airspace and safely in South Africa,” he said without a hint of humor. He had just endured a four-hour check-in, and had been worried that he might miss the flight. When we touched down a few hours later, he shook his head with relief.

“That was the worst assignment ever,” he said. “I’ve lived in Africa for 10 years, traveled everywhere, seen it all. I know Africa, so I figured this would be fine.”